You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction

Monthly Archives: July 2016

This post may sound bitter and rhetorical, but it’s the result of a couple of good days when my disease hasn’t hit me that hard. I appreciated even the most stupid thing like waking up without crying for pain, being able to walk, to eat, to have a nice conversation without that fucking headache or brain fog. The pleasure to read a book, to go to the beach, to stay with my family, to talk with my friends without complaining.

Life is amazing, even in its simplicity. Never take things for granted, nothing, never. Be grateful for every little thing and show love to family and friends because you don’t know if it could be the last time you see them.

You mustn’t think you’re safe from negativity because you are young, because you have a house, a work or just because you’re a good person. Fate may hit hard on everyone at any time. And whoever said that life is too short to waste it being angry or sad, was perfectly right.

Take the phone and call your mom, go out for a walk with your dog, take time to ask your brother if he’s ok, surprise your friend with a letter, try something new to eat and smile!

I’m grateful for the good days and thankful for the friends who make them special.

Please watch the video before going on reading. It will explain this serious issue better than me and images are more effective than words.

I’ve always been fairly distrustful on charities because I’ve always asked myself if that money would have gone where needed or just wasted, but since JD started being involved with Food4theHungry, a non-profit organization that aims to end world hunger, I could see how serious this organisation is and how effective. So I visited their site and my trust was restored: their aim is to end poverty one community at a time and since the first embryonic stage of society is family, their purpose is to help families to have means and competence and to develop their skills to grow up in order to be able to help community. It’s amazing to see how with a single action, you can be solving multiple problems!

Food4The Hungry projects are many and all important, you can:

Sponsor a child. With the small amount of $35 each month you can change not only the life of your sponsored child, but also their family and community. Indeed through your sponsorship, you’ll help Food for the Hungry in assisting your child’s entire community to provide food, a better education, clean water and medical treatment to its children. Please notice that at the moment sponsoring a child is only for the US, but on the site there’s a form you can fill if you live elsewhere.

Help unsponsored children have opportunity for food, clothes, and education.

Help disaster survivors receive shelter and food immediately.

Provide FH community members with tools and everything they need to grow trees and training to help families grow vegetables in a harsh climate.

Provide school supplies

Give the gift of cool, clear and clean water to a community through water purifying packets or filters.

But one of the most important thing is that this charity brings hope even in the hardest places and demonstrates that if you are actually passionate to make a change and to actually try to affect people’s lives in a positive way, you can, even if you’re a common person.

As regarding JD, people consider him a celebrity, but he’s just an ordinary guy with an extraordinary heart. And it’s a very good thing he turned into an influencer, because it’s important to shift his audience’s attention on things bigger than his work. That’s why he and Jeff Gilbert made this journey to Rwanda and made this video so we can to learn more about Josh’s plan who invited his fan base into his astounding work with Food4The Hungry. So in March, Josh visited Rwanda to meet Evaride, the child he personally sponsors through FH. His journey was documented as the first part of the documentary series “The Hardest Places.” This video will be used in a full social media campaign to raise money and awareness for FH.

I wish I wasn’t unemployed due to my health, I’d love to be part of this big project and devolve the money I spend for my meds and cures for a higher plan. So the only support I can give is to spread the word because if JD used his social influence, I could use blogging.

Please get involved, share this and feel free to ask me anything about this project.

Please notice that the quote above is not from Ghandi: it’s just a short recap to reduce to a slogan his deeper thought about how we mirror the world and that we need to start a long path of inner introspection and hard work before making a difference. If you’re interested, here it is the part where this quote comes from:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do”

But to me the point is the message not the messenger, so here’s what this post is about. Each time I read a newspaper or the news online, the only thing that strikes my attention is how much violence there’s in the world, at any level. Racial hate, terrorism, but also simply the guy killing his girlfriend or the father who exterminates his family. Grief doesn’t need big numbers, it’s a matter of names and lives. All all this makes me eager of positive things and positive figures and now you get to whom I was thinking about.

Yesterday it was JD’s 25th birthday. I think that special extraordinary people like him, who care for others with so much warmth and kindness, make such a wonderful difference. I hope he knows how much I “love” him. Honestly the world would be such a nicer place if everybody was like him and please don’t ask me what makes him so outstanding, because I don’t know where to start from. “Special” is the only thing that comes to my mind.

Hope you all have your own lifesaver to hang on when the light goes off, I wish to mine a life full of smiles, fulfilled dreams, goals set, friends, new experiences, surprises and never ending joy. Please, J, never ever change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide lately and that’s positive because the people who can think about it in a lucid and analytic way, are those who will never commit. I made a couple of attempt when I was younger, for problems that, in the end, had a solution, not like now where I’m struggling against an invisible enemy. I’m without a clear diagnosis and a working cure, alone with a new pain or disease everyday. I’m ready to fight, I’m a tough warrior, but I’d like to know what I’m fighting against.

I try to focus on the positive things left in my life (honestly thinking to those who have a worse situation doesn’t work and it also makes me feel guilty), but sometimes pain and deception wins. So I feel tired to ask myself if tomorrow will be a good or a bad day, to cancel plans, can’t be sure of anything, of being called lazy or that it’s everything in my head. Then the dark cloud approaches and I can’t help thinking that my family will be better without me. I feel useful and a waste of time and even if I struggle not to let my disease to define who I am, there’s no doubt it’s silently deleting my life, my positive thoughts, the goals I want to set.

I read an Italian book “La Casa Blu” about the will to find a more decent way to pass over than let people finding you hung somewhere or crashed downstairs. I found this sentence I related to “today I’m too tired to live and to live, hope tomorrow is a better day”

Hope. There’s still hope, even in the darkest situation and I’m going to use it as a rope to escape this well of pain. So, come on girl, put some music on, wear your invisible superhero cape and kick this day in the ass. Remember to turn the pain into power and that tomorrow is JD’s birthday.

Ps. I wrote a fanfic about love and suicide: its title is “The Reasons Why”, maybe one of my best piece of writing.

Honestly after reading about the most recent facts, I can’t avoid remarking what I said yesterday: all monsters are human; our society is dominated by hate and that’s scaring and painful.

Bad day for my aching body too, so I tried to distract myself from it by doing a bit of my Wreck This Journal and by trying to face again Finnegans Wake by Joyce.

First part was easy, I’m not good at drawing, but it relaxes me a lot. Here’s my bad portrait of Twisty the clown from AHS Freakshow.

Second part was challenging, but I think I found the right way to go through Joyce’s work. He wrote Finnegans Wake in 17 years and it is said that he expected the reader to spend the same amount of time on it. Moreover he said that it would have kept critics busy for at least 150 years. I must admit that things are easier and less frustrating since I stopped the analytic approach and I read it following the musical flow of words. In the end Joyce was a writer, but he also loved music a lot, he was a good tenor.

And if you don’t try to understand its literary puns, the book is much more pleasant. I have a theory about it: what if Joyce wanted to jerk critics and readers around with a nonsense work just because he knew they will have received it as a masterpiece and will have spent hours and words trying to decript it? I’m sure his aim was this and moreover I’m sure he hid in the novel a meaning nobody will ever find.

So if you want to read Finnegans Wake, enjoy(ce). You can listen some good Celtic punk while reading as well.

My laptop died again, it is surely as sickly as its owner (while my phone has the auto correct as dirty as my mind since it always turns Skype into skyporn, croutches into crotches and so on).

So I couldn’t read any book and I couldn’t finish watching American Horror Story Freakshow, that caught my attention since episode 1. Oh no, I’m not victim of the fascinating Evan Peters, I’m into drummers you know, not into actors; I only liked it a lot because it distracted me from my health issues and because it has a deep message.

The supposed monsters are just kind and big hearted people with physical deformities, who only wish for a normal life and look for an integration in that society that confined them into the striped tent of a freakshow.

The real monster of the show live outside the circus, they are those who appear “normal”, people that society receives, accepts, justifies and often thinks they are role models. But leaving aside the tv show: how many times after a killer has been caught, the most frequent sentence we hear about them is “he/she was kind/nice/polite” “he/she seemed so normal”. We should reflect more about what “normal” means, honestly to me it doesn’t affect the physical aspect or the mental development, it’s something related to feelings and behaviour. And I know so many monsters, so many human monsters…

TRACK OF THE DAY: Life on Mars? Jessica Lange as Elsa Mars from AHS Freakshow